Hello everyone!
Whew! It's been a year since I've done any written reflection like this. If you didn't already receive them, I used to write rather long reflection documents and e-mail them out to my family and close friends. Now, after talking with some of you about this, I've decided to move to a blog format. Feel free to subscribe!
Why now? Well, the last two weeks, I've made a serious effort to live intentionally, keeping a schedule of my time, and now that i's clear that that's here to stay, reflecting is something I decided I'd like to have in that routine, probably at the rate of about one post every week or two.
Now, there's a year of my life that many of you only have snippets of, and I've sketched some thoughts down about that time that I'll slowly add back in when it feels appropriate.
Why here? I created this blog over a year ago with the hopes of populating it with deep theological reflection on the intersection of Christianity and rationalism. Well, I'll still hopefully have some deep reflections here, but I'll also (and possibly primarily) share personal stories and realizations from my life.
You might find this dichotomy interesting, from William James' Pragmatism:
ReplyDeleteTHE TENDER-MINDED
Rationalistic (going by 'principles'), Intellectualistic, Idealistic, Optimistic, Religious, Free-willist, Monistic, Dogmatical.
THE TOUGH-MINDED
Empiricist (going by 'facts'), Sensationalistic, Materialistic, Pessimistic, Irreligious, Fatalistic, Pluralistic, Sceptical.
I'm not sure why he clustered all of those binary variables together, but the first one at least seems to be more similar to the S/N dichotomy in MBTI than what I mean by "rationalist." I'll hopefully explain the latter further in a future post.
DeleteI am tempted to view rationalistic folks as attempting to fit the known facts with a single manifold with beautiful description, and are ok if some of the facts are at some distance from the manifold—the most valuable thing is a clean, total explanation. In contrast, I view the empiricist as being happy with a cluster of 'patches' which match bits and pieces of the [true] manifold, but which don't necessary connect to each other in a [mathematically] beautiful way. Does this dichotomy make any sense? If so, perhaps you can state it more elegantly. :-)
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